Valve has moved to dismiss the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the company, which claims loot boxes in its games such as Counter-Strike 2 promote illegal gambling and threaten to addict children.
The fact that California decided to sue Valve for Counterstrike and not sue EA for FIFA is just blatant targeted harassment. Valve’s right for pointing out that any precedent set here would make Pokemon cards and Baseball cards illegal, both of which are actually advertised directly to kids.
only on a secondary market in which those companies don’t participate. it’s a paper thin line which keeps trading card game booster packs from beeing gambling in a legal sense
the difference is that wotc won’t give you anything for your magic cards, but you can directly sell skins on steam and actually buy something with it, which from my understanding gives the skins direct, and sometimes really high value, which might make this actual gambling, simmiliar to how you exchange your chetons in a casino.
wotc and other simmiliar companies skirt around that by not acknowledging that a second marekt exists and not participating in it.
I don’t think that’s how the law is written though. You can only get steam wallet funds for your skins, steam wallet funds explicitly have no cash value. The transaction at that point is done. A video game also has “real world value” you could just as easily say well I get steam wallet funds and than sell gifted games to other people. I don’t think your argument tracks with the law or steams user agreement.
The fact that California decided to sue Valve for Counterstrike and not sue EA for FIFA is just blatant targeted harassment. Valve’s right for pointing out that any precedent set here would make Pokemon cards and Baseball cards illegal, both of which are actually advertised directly to kids.
valve has a way to transfer money in your steam wallet into something with real world value: hardware.
you can not trade pokemon cards with nintendo for game cartridges or money, that is the whole distinction, no secondary market required.
Dont the cards have value?
only on a secondary market in which those companies don’t participate. it’s a paper thin line which keeps trading card game booster packs from beeing gambling in a legal sense
I’m not at all experienced this stuff so sorry if this is obvious - but how is that different from hardware?
Its not like valve is reimbursing cash for the hardware after bought, theyre both just some materials (that can be sold elsewhere for cash) right?
the difference is that wotc won’t give you anything for your magic cards, but you can directly sell skins on steam and actually buy something with it, which from my understanding gives the skins direct, and sometimes really high value, which might make this actual gambling, simmiliar to how you exchange your chetons in a casino.
wotc and other simmiliar companies skirt around that by not acknowledging that a second marekt exists and not participating in it.
but i am not a lawyer obviously.
I don’t think that’s how the law is written though. You can only get steam wallet funds for your skins, steam wallet funds explicitly have no cash value. The transaction at that point is done. A video game also has “real world value” you could just as easily say well I get steam wallet funds and than sell gifted games to other people. I don’t think your argument tracks with the law or steams user agreement.
it’s the only difference i see to other loot boxes or trading card games.
So if they did not have any hardware available it would have been fine?
Maybe Steam should change the policy that store credits cannot be used to buy hardware
thats my understanding of it and if valve loses this, they’ll introduce gabe bucks to buy boxes and keys with and nothing meaningful will change.